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FBI: Police officers, jail guards were muscle for 'drug deals'

FBI STING | 15 officers charged with guarding fake drug dealers

Wednesday, December 03, 2008Chicago Sun-Timesby Natasha Korecki and Frank Main

They stood guard over drug shipments.

They watched over high-stakes poker games.

And they were supposed to get in the way of the cops if something went wrong.

Except they were the police.

Drug charges were unsealed Tuesday against 15 officers: four Harvey
cops, 10 Cook County correctional officers and a Chicago Police
officer. The FBI orchestrated 12 fake drug deals over the last year.

They "sold out their badges and agreed for money to help drug dealers do their business," U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said.

Two of the men are serving with the Army National Guard in Afghanistan and will be brought back to Chicago to face charges.

The 15 officers took up to $4,000 each to act as lookouts and
intervene if police or rival drug dealers tried to interfere with
shipments of cocaine and heroin, prosecutors said. Two officers were
charged with selling cocaine.

In May, a plane landed at DuPage Airport, where jail guards Ahyetoro
Taylor and Raphael Manuel boarded and allegedly began counting what
they thought were 80 kilos of cocaine stashed in four duffel bags.

Taylor and Manuel believed they were guarding a drug dealer, but he
was really an undercover FBI agent. They were each paid $4,000 and
allegedly recruited others in law enforcement to do the same kind of
moonlighting.

Many of the men knew each other from their jobs as jail guards.
Timothy Funches, Richard Hall and Robert Kelly were all hired Nov. 1,
2004, county records show.

Also caught up in the sting was Harvey officer Archie Stallworth,
who is accused of accompanying an undercover agent to DuPage Airport on
Aug. 11 and accepting $1,000 after handling three duffel bags
purportedly containing 30 kilos of cocaine.

The undercover FBI agent was posing as an employee of a strip club in Harvey, sources said.

In 2005, a Harvey Police dispatcher and a Harvey Police officer were
among 15 people charged in federal court with failing to report income
they earned while moonlighting as guards at strip clubs, including the
Skybox in Harvey.

Stallworth, who also worked as a Metra conductor and was seen as a
right-hand man of Harvey Mayor Eric Kellogg, was fired from his Metra
job Tuesday. He resigned last week from his police job.